"Lee Killough - Liberty's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Killough Lee)

 Prologue

Text of a voice-only recording found in a Lockheed Ares-15 tachyon courier capsule, recovered at the Vladikov Space
Platform July 26, 2078, at 2:53 pm, Greenwich time. Recording is that of a tired-sounding male voice.
"This is Jaes Laurent of the Laheli Colonial Company's ramjet Invictus. We launched from the Glenn Space Plat-form
on July 8, 2068. Our destination was the planet Future. At the time of this recording, we have been in flight four
months, ship's time. Over the past two weeks, we have experienced repeated breakdowns and failures in the
life-support systems of our sleeper sections. The on-board computer has diagnosed system overloading but is unable
to give us the cause of the overloading and has been able to instruct us how to make only temporary repairs. We have
now lost four hundred of our sleepers and face the possibility of losing more. All ten crewmembers are awake and
working to repair the failures as they occur, but we don't know how well we'll succeed. We realize there's no possibility
of you on Earth being able to help us. This message is not a distress call. We just want someone to know what
happened to us, and perhaps bring a problem to attention so as to save the lives of future colonists."
End of message.
 Chapter One

They lived not in an expanding universe, but a collapsing one. Since the nightmare began, it had shrunk from infin-ity
to the bulkheads of the Invictus—no longer the master of its fate—a nutshell bounded by panels of flashing over-load
lights, the piercing bleat of electronic alarms, and sleepers dying rack by rack. And for Liberty Siempre Ibarra, it had
shrunk still further, to the portside number Fifteen rack, where the acrid scent of hot metal and plastic greeted her as
she crawled out across the horizontal rack, ducking her head to clear Port Fourteen close above it. Her reflection
spread blurrily across the plastic curve of each pod she passed: a girl looking younger than her twenty-five years,
small and wiry with sooty eyes and dark hair bestowed by the hispanics and amerinds among her mixed ancestry. She
hissed in disgust as she shined her work light at the nearer of the two open-faced mechanics conduits.
"Damn, You almost managed to sixty-one yourself this time, didn't you?"
The nutrient booster pump had overheated, but rather than simply seize up, it had melted holes in its plastic casing,
including around the male connector to the incom-ing nutrient line. The tube lay in the bottom of the conduit in a
puddle of nutrient. The piston, still functioning, pushed air up the out-line.
LIBERTY'S WORLD 7

Hurriedly, she deactivated the pump and clamped the tubing, then swung the work light toward the nearest pod,
and swore again. Air filled the nutrient reservoir. A mem-brane was supposed to prevent anything but the nutrients
from diffusing down into the sleeper's bloodstream, but the way this ship had been functioning, Liberty did not trust
any of the "supposeds." What confidence could anyone place in a ship that was nothing more than a collection of
colonial building materials temporarily assem-bled into a ship?
Unfortunately, she reflected, the crew was just as jury-rigged, products of Boeing's quickly ship-maintainence
course and coming out of mostly non-spacing mechanics backgrounds like hers, keeping Harry German's horse van
running from bush track to bush track. Nothing had pre-pared them to deal with a massive failure like this one. She
sighed. Maybe the scraping, low-profile existence forced on a free, Undocumented person on Earth had been a small
price to pay for continued life.
Then she grimaced. She was not on Earth any longer and since she happened to be stuck here, at least she could
prevent the ship from killing them without a fight!
Using tubing on her tool belt, she by-passed the booster to bleed all air out of the lines and reservoirs and refill
each individually, then she went to work with tools and prosthoplastik on the pump itself.
"No mindless pile of plastic and metal is just going to walk away with your lives with me around," she promised the
unhearing sleepers.
"Do you often talk to them?"
tf~

Liberty stiffened and jerked around. Beyond the work light's bright pool, Noel Hedinger's square face and rusty